


Thirteen Days

by draculard



Series: Comfortween [4]
Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, It's a sick fic yall people are sick, Mutual Pining, Nausea, Pre-Relationship, Sick!Faro, Sick!Thrawn, Sickfic, Wow am I literally just listing symptoms as tags???, fatigue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26807125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Soon, Faro will be off the Chimaera and on her way to her own command.Assuming she gets over this mysterious illness first.
Relationships: Karyn Faro/Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Series: Comfortween [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946224
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44
Collections: Comfortween 2020





	Thirteen Days

Faro was exiting the Chimaera’s medbay when she ran into Thrawn — almost literally. If he hadn’t grabbed her forearms and gently sidestepped her, they would have bumped right into each other. He used her momentum to swing her around until they were facing opposite ways from where they started, and then he guided her to an easy halt, leaving her still somewhat dizzy.

“Commodore,” he said.

She shook the haze out of her head and looked at him. There were deep bags beneath his eyes, more red than purple, and his cheekbones seemed more pronounced than usual. For a moment, he didn’t move his hands off Faro’s arms.

“Admiral,” Faro replied.

He studied her a moment — longer than Faro felt comfortable with, long enough to make her certain that he’d noticed something unpleasant about her, just like she’d noticed the unflattering bags beneath his eyes — and then he stepped away. His eyes shifted to the medbay door.

He didn’t ask. Faro felt compelled to tell him anyway.

“Just a loss of appetite, sir,” she said. “Nothing serious.”

He gave a faint nod. While his head was turned, Faro caught herself looking him up and down, taking in the starkness of his cheekbones once more — and the unusually loose fit of his uniform tunic.

She didn’t say anything. It wasn’t her place. But then Thrawn looked at her, realized she was studying him, and said, “Yes, me too,” as if he felt compelled to share the same way she had. He glanced at the medbay door again and seemed to reconsider. “Were the droids able to assist you with your symptoms?” he asked.

Faro frowned. The way he’d worded that question, it seemed like he somehow already knew the answer. Most people would have phrased it differently, like ‘Are you feeling better now?’ or ‘Did they get you squared away?’

“No,” she said. “Not really. The scans didn’t come up with anything wrong.”

Thrawn absorbed this. He moved casually away from the medbay door, as if he’d never been heading there at all, and Faro followed him. They moved with almost dreamlike slowness down the corridor until Thrawn opened the hatch to an empty conference room and they stepped inside.

“This is my second day seeing them,” said Thrawn, his tone neutral. “Unfortunately, there are no Chiss bio-records on file. I assumed the problem lay with a lack of information regarding my species.” 

He put slight emphasis on species, so Faro knew exactly what he was going to say next.

“You think it’s more to do with the virus?” she asked. Then hastily added, “Or whatever it is we have?”

“If indeed we have the same illness at all,” Thrawn said with a polite nod. He took a seat at the conference table — not at the head, like most commanding officers would, but off to the side. Faro sat across from him and watched him fold his hands on the tabletop. He leaned forward, cocking his head to the side in thought; it made him look like he was staring at a holo-presentation only he could see. 

“If it doesn’t embarrass you,” he said mildly, “I’d like to compare symptoms. I will go first; you may decide once I’m done if you wish to share, or you may simply tell me whether our symptoms match.”

Somewhat relieved by that, Faro nodded. 

“General fatigue,” Thrawn said. He made a face and gestured to the bags under his eyes. “Yet also insomnia. Lack of appetite and weight loss. Restlessness. Inability to concentrate.”

He grimaced as he said that last bit, and Faro suspected he would have been less embarrassed to admit to something legitimately awful, like incontinence. She waited a beat to make sure he was done.

“Largely the same, sir,” she said. “Except I’m lethargic rather than restless. I haven’t had the willpower to train all week.”

Thrawn tilted his head to the other side, studying her face with narrowed eyes. “Interesting,” he said. “I’ve had the opposite problem. Not a surplus of energy, but certainly a surplus of _expended_ energy, leaving me in deficit.”

Meaning he’d been working out multiple times a day, Faro supposed. And, since she’d seen how polished his desk in the aft bridge office was this week, he’d probably done a great deal of frenetic cleaning, too. It was hard to look at the exhausted man before her and imagine him limping through a sparring match or forcing himself to clean. 

She sat back, unable to hold back a weary sigh. 

“This is suboptimal,” Thrawn told her.

Faro agreed. She tracked back over the past week or so, trying to figure out what could have happened. “Do you remember when you started showing symptoms, sir?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Thrawn at once. “It was eight days ago.”

“Same for me,” Faro said. It was easy to remember — because _nine_ days ago she’d learned she was getting her own command, and she’d spent the night celebrating at the ship cantina. When her first symptoms reared their ugly heads the next day, she’d assumed they were just signs of a hangover at first. She frowned, trying to remember if Thrawn had been in the cantina that day.

 _Surely_ she would have noticed the ship’s only blue man if he were in the cantina.

“You didn’t happen to do some drinking the night before, did you, sir?” she asked.

Thrawn gazed back at her, his face blank and placid. “Copious amounts of drinking,” he said evenly. He didn’t seem embarrassed by the admission.

Taken aback, Faro only blinked at him for a moment before nodding. “In the cantina?”

“In my quarters,” he said. “I do not frequent the cantina.”

Well, no dice, there. 

“What were you drinking, if you don’t mind me asking?” Faro said. Before Thrawn could answer, she rushed to explain. “I was drinking the night before as well. To celebrate.”

A strange expression flickered over Thrawn’s face before he nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said carefully. “Your promotion.”

Faro hesitated over what to say; somehow, she didn’t feel like talking about it. She’d just parted her lips when Thrawn dipped his head almost courteously and said, “Congratulations again, Commodore,” his voice coming out stilted.

“Ah, thank you, sir,” said Faro. She felt a stab of queasiness go through her. 

“You think we may have ingested some common malfactive ingredient,” Thrawn said. He turned this over in his head and then beckoned for Faro’s datapad, an easy, familiar gesture that made her sudden sense of nausea ease. Keying it on, he said, “I was drinking a Corellian variant of hard liquor called Starshine. You?”

“Paravian whiskey and soda,” Faro said. She leaned forward a little, watching as Thrawn typed both brands in and compared the list of ingredients. “You didn’t have any chaser, sir?”

“Chaser?” he said absently, as if the word were foreign to him. He turned the datapad to face her, with a few shared ingredients highlighted. “None of these have caused me issues in the past,” he said. “And in any case, the manufacturers are different for Corellia and Parav. It seems unlikely both manufacturers would suffer the same equipment malfunction or tainted crops.”

Faro nodded grimly. She’d never had a bad reaction to those ingredients, either. Nor to the soda she’d mixed the Paravian whiskey with. “So we can rule out the alcohol for now,” she said, sitting back. “Where does that leave us?”

She could see the gears turning in Thrawn’s head even as he banished the search results. “Tainted food is possible but unlikely,” he said. “And generally does not cause symptoms like ours. If we had both been planet-side together at some point in the recent past…”

“But we haven’t,” Faro finished for him. “So we couldn’t have picked up an alien virus.”

Thrawn was silent for a moment. “No one else is suffering from these symptoms,” he told her, his voice quiet. “I asked the droid to run a search of the Chimaera’s medical records without telling me any names.”

Faro squirmed in her seat, fighting back a spike of anxiety. “Rukh’s been planet-side recently,” she pointed out. “And he rarely talks to anyone other than you or me. He could have picked up something his species is immune to and passed it onto us.”

Thrawn raised his eyebrows, gave it a moment of thought, and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A viable theory.” They looked at each other, neither of them speaking. “But if it is a virus,” Thrawn said, “it isn’t one with which the medical droids are familiar. Treatment is unknown.”

“Yes,” Faro said with a grimace. “So…”

“We haven’t infected anyone else so far,” Thrawn said almost reluctantly. “And as there is no known treatment or medication — and since ‘sleeping it off’ does not seem to be an option for us — I suggest we attend our duties as usual.”

Which was more or less what Faro expected him to say. He stared down at her datapad for a long moment, regarding the blank screen, before he pushed it across the table to her. Faro fiddled with it briefly before turning it off, unsure what to do or say now.

“You’ll be leaving for the training center soon,” said Thrawn, changing the subject abruptly.

A chill washed over Faro. The nausea was back.

“Yes,” she said. “Two weeks, according to High Command.” 

Thrawn watched her, his face unreadable, and Faro tried to force a smile. 

“You look forward to it?” Thrawn asked, his eyes darting down to her lips. 

“Don’t I look excited?” Faro replied — and immediately regretted the dryness of her voice.

“Perhaps excited,” said Thrawn mildly, as if he hadn’t noticed the sarcasm. “Perhaps anxious. The two often go hand in hand.”

And Faro had no idea how to respond to that. She _was_ excited — she’d been itching to get her own command since she made lieutenant. But it was hard to embrace that excitement when she felt so weary she could lay her head down on this table and fall asleep right then and there. She imagined herself struggling through command training on Coruscant, unable to prove her real potential or show her worth — and all because of some unknown fatigue-inducing disease that she couldn’t even name. She imagined doing so poorly that it reflected not just on her own name and career but on Thrawn’s, the man who’d recommended her.

She imagined failing. She imagined returning to the Chimaera in shame, forced to take up her old position as first officer.

For some reason, the nausea lessened.

Thrawn was still studying her, but when Faro met his eyes, he politely averted his gaze. “You will be an excellent commanding officer, Commodore,” he told her, his tone matter-of-fact rather than comforting. “Even before you had the benefit of my tutelage, I believe you were ready for command.”

Faro snorted, but felt no real offense. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I’m glad for your tutelage regardless.”

Thrawn started to nod. He froze in the middle of the gesture, lips tightening, and looked away. Faro watched him, recognizing the signs of nausea, and said nothing — she only waited for it to pass. 

When it faded a little, she said tentatively, “I _am_ looking forward to it, sir. But … I’d like to stay in touch.”

Thrawn’s face spasmed. “Of course,” he said, his voice tight. “Of course, we shall.”

He parted his lips, ready to say something else, and then paused again. When he finally did speak, it was a quiet, “Excuse me,” as he stood from his chair. 

Faro should have gone after him, she knew, but as the door to the conference room slid shut, she realized she was too weary to move.

* * *

Her symptoms were no better the next day. Faro pulled herself out of bed feeling like she’d been beaten half-to-death with a clawhammer. Her limbs were heavy; her face felt like an immovable rubber mask that someone had sewn into her skin. It took her three tries to do everything — to grab her toothbrush, to turn the sonic on, to fix her hair into a bun. 

When she reached the bridge, she caught sight of Thrawn — who looked like he’d been hit in the face with a landspeeder — and reassured herself that at least he was no better.

It wasn’t the most comforting thought.

“Sir,” she said, stepping up beside him on the command walkway. Her voice came out scratchy and hoarse, making her wince.

“Commodore,” said Thrawn. His tunic collar was rumpled in the back, and without thinking, Faro reached up and straightened it out, her fingers brushing the cold skin on the back of his neck. Thrawn froze the moment she reached for him, keeping his eyes straight, neither thanking her nor insisting he do it himself.

She dropped her hands to her sides once the collar was fixed, feeling strangely shaky. In fact, her legs felt like water.

In fact, she thought she’d better sit down.

She mumbled an excuse to Thrawn — whose jaw was tight, and who didn’t answer — and made her way to the nearest control station, plopping down gracelessly in the empty seat next to Hammerly. Eyes closed, Faro took slow, shallow breaths, working through a wave of discomfort that straddled the line between regular fatigue and the need to throw up. 

Thirteen more days. Thirteen days, and she’d be off to Coruscant.

The surge of weakness faded slowly — she didn’t feel ready to stand again until nearly fifteen minutes into her shift. When she finally felt stable enough to turn her head, she found Hammerly staring steadfastly at the weapons console, giving Faro as much privacy as she could. Across the bridge, Thrawn was still standing, but leaning heavily on the back of his command chair. 

He was being atypically open with his exhaustion, Faro thought. Perhaps he simply couldn’t hide it anymore.

“Feeling better?” asked Hammerly without glancing Faro’s way.

Faro let out a slow, whistling sigh. “Yeah,” she said. Thirteen days.

“Good.” Then, her voice flat, Hammerly added, “You two need to get a grip.”

Faro whipped her head around, a movement that sent waves of nausea through her all over again. “ _What_?” she hissed, more from pain than anything else. 

“You and the admiral,” said Hammerly, eyes still fixed on her console. “No offense, ma’am. Ever since you two found out you’re leaving, you’ve been so lovesick you can barely—”

A steady roar started in Faro’s ears. Her skin turned cold. She didn’t hear the rest of what Hammerly said.

 _Lovesick?_ she thought.

She glanced at Thrawn, remembering with a sudden jolt his symptoms: fatigue, insomnia, restlessness, loss of appetite, weight loss. He’d been over-exercising, he said, and cleaning obsessively, yet he hadn’t been able to concentrate on his work. 

Not since they found out Faro was getting her own command.

And her own symptoms, she realized, were no different. There wasn’t a single one that couldn’t be explained by a mental problem as easily as a physical one. But she didn’t — she wasn’t—

Thrawn glanced back, his eyes meeting hers, and she remembered with a jolt how her fingers had brushed his skin. 

She looked at Hammerly again, eyes wide.

“But I’m…” she said.

Hammerly stared at her console. She didn’t so much as glance at Faro.

“But you’re leaving,” she finished when Faro couldn’t. “And there’s nothing you can do. And now you’re so depressed about it that it’s making you sick. Trust me, I _know_.”

Across the bridge, Thrawn caught Faro looking at him and met her gaze.

“And he knows it, too,” Hammerly said. 

Faro’s heart was thudding in her throat. She stared at Thrawn, feeling herself begin to sweat. She barely noticed it when Hammerly nudged her.

“Talk to him,” she said.


End file.
